Bankruptcy filings rise 30% this year

Bankruptcy filings rose 30% during the government's 2008 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, according to figures released Monday by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Total bankruptcy filings increased by 241,724 cases, or 30%, to 1.04 million in the 12 months between Oct. 1, 2007, and Sept. 30, 2008.

For the three months ended Sept. 30, total bankruptcies rose nearly 34% to 292,291, up from 218,909 in the same period last year. Fiscal fourth-quarter filings were up 60% from 182,973 in the previous quarter.

Non-business filings totaled just over 1 million for the year, up 30% from the 775,344 non-business filings in fiscal 2007. Business filings rose 49% to 38,651, up from 25,925 business filings in the previous 12-month period.

"The dramatic spike in both personal and business bankruptcies reflects an economy in distress," Samuel Gerdano, executive director of the American Bankruptcy Institution, said in a written statement.

Still, the 1.04 million filings for the 12 months ended in September are fewer than the 1.12 million filings the government fielded two years ago, for the 12 months ended in September 2006.

Bankruptcy filings surged in 2006 as businesses and individuals raced to file before the implementation of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

Total filings dropped nearly 28% in fiscal 2007 as the 2005 act, which made it harder for individuals to receive Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, went into effect. But this year's tough financial environment ratcheted filings back up: Chapter 7 filings rose 40% to 679,982 in the 12 months that ended Sept. 30.

Chapter 7 bankruptcy is designed to give individual debtors a "fresh start" by discharging many of their debts. Under Chapter 7, a filer's assets - minus those exempted by his or her home state - are liquidated and given to the creditors who are first in line for repayment. Any debts that remain are cancelled.

Another type of individual bankruptcy, Chapter 13, requires debtors to pay back their debts over time. Chapter 13 filings rose 14% this year to 353,828, up from 310,802 a year earlier.

Filings for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is aimed at assisting struggling corporations or partnerships, rose 40% to 8,799 from 5,888

Note: All these posts are from CNN news.

Credit card crackdown coming soon

Cash-strapped consumers might get some welcome news on Thursday when regulators vote to rein in controversial credit card practices.

The proposed rules, which have received overwhelming consumer support, prohibit banks from practices like raising the interest rates on pre-existing credit card balances unless a payment is over 30 days late, and applying payments in a way that maximizes interest penalties.

The Federal Reserve Board, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration, are all expected to approve the regulation. The rules are expected to take effect by 2010.

"It will fundamentally change the relationship between cardholders and banks," said Peter Garuccio, a spokesman from the American Bankers Association.

If approved, the Fed's rules will mean an end to double-cycle billing, which averages out the balance from two previous bills. That means that consumers who carry a balance can get hit with retroactive interest on their previous month's bill - even if they've already paid that off.

Consumers would also be given a reasonable amount of time to make payments, and payments would be applied to higher-rate balances first to reduce interest penalties and fees.

Credit card statements would clearly list the time of day that a payment is due, and any changes to accounts would be in bold or listed separately.

And, finally, no more universal defaults, a policy which allows credit card issuers to increase the interest rate on one card if a customer misses a payment on another card.

mom

Mom,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, !!!

Today i got somethings to tell both of u.

I luv u so much and miss u a lot. Whenever they give me pressure, they blame me even not my fault. Why the lady, mgr is always misunderstand me. Not only her but also all these people act crazy things to me. I feel tired and sorry but no body know about it. When they shout me without proper reason and don't listen my explanation or whatever, all people, friends around me, they looking me with pity sight and me is the one to b scolded,shouted even given overloaded works. Now the problem is not with boss u know, with FO MGR and her lovely stfs.

Mom, I feel tired. I tried, tried to change the relationship btwn me & mgr.It is too tied to work with them. I miss you so much mom. I miss your love, in past whenever i met like this kind of thing and felt disappointed, you hug me and said "baby, don't worry mom is by ur side and they can't do my daughter even single hair, don't b so sad and must b smart girl" . I miss u a lot mom.

However now, I got another one more person who care me nearly with u. He's my bf. Sry mom, I hven't told u abt him but i can say that i don't let u worry for it. Mom, even u'r not here and i didn't tell single problems whatever i'd met here coz i afraid u sad. But mom, i can tell him all the things facing with me even not important. He understand me and he give me strength to stand and face all the problems and complicated things. Mom, ur smart daughter can choose the right man is it? I'm sure that he's the one i believable.

Actually today i'm so tired and feel so sad, but after talking with him, the feelings bcom well a little bit. Now, I use to liten his words. I like to listen but not alwys :P coz i want to b freedom!!!!

MOM >>>>> HOWEVER TODAY I MISS U A LOT >>>>> LOVE U SO MUCH>>> MUAH>> mei mei<<<<<<

အလြမ္းမ်ားစြာ

အိမ္ျပန္ခ်ိန္ဘယ္ေတာ့လဲ .......
အရင္ခ်ိန္ေတြကိုအရမ္းလြမ္းတယ္... အရာရာကိုသတိရေနတယ္...
သတိရလို႔ၾကည့္လိုက္ရင္ ကိုယ့္ေဘးမွာဘယ္သူမွမရွိဘူး ..
လြမ္းတယ္.. ျပန္လိုခ်င္တယ္..
အိမ္ကိုလြမ္းတယ္.. သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြကိုလြမ္းတယ္..
ခ်စ္သူကိုလည္းလြမ္းတယ္.

Cool,Pleasant Place

>>>>> it's cool^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ right?

This is the lake, named Inn Lay in Shan State near Taunggyi, my lovely pleasant place. See next

Near the entrance of our town^^^^^^nice right?^^^^

Part of our town, House with red roofs :)

TAUNG CHUNNNNNN ^^^^

SeE .....^^^^ thE NaTiOnalities Of oUrS..^^^

Miss this place a lot!!! :'(

the moment for couple

Love is it hot? i'm not too sure to say for the non-power human.
Last day he and me got misunderstand each others.Connection of internet is so slow,cudn't hear properly from him though he heard what i said. Starting from here. It's just small case but make me upset. What happen was that he said that i knew the love is too hot but don't want to release it. I understand what he meant from which side.
Even though my brain was understood, my heart still pain for it. From the other people sight, it might not b the problem but for me i felt sorry.

my boyfriend

He, .... u know who?
My boyfriend....

I love him so much does he know? I met him may be since his shop started opening. At that time, the connection was too bad. My friend,noe noe and me went to his shop and he told me about connection. Why i remember such this kind of small incident!!!!!

Then i went back to Ygn for 6 months more. The second time i came back to his shop and I disliked him and angried for not giving me a favor more than my friend. That was he gave some discounts for my friend and not me. And i requested for it but he said cannot. Bad guy !!!!
You know whenever his face looks like people in all over the world are fed by him. No wonder his character like that, as he is a lecturer for computer science.

At first, I never knew that i would fall in love with him coz i dislike him a lot. But all these kinds of things put me to interest all about him. Like a fool right? Later I tried to keep in touch with him without reason and I feel enjoyable when i talked together by chatting. Finally i know that my mind is already interested him not disliking. But too late at that time, on his Gtalk written some words before he went to Mdy. All these words push me to regonize that i love him so much coz i'm crying for these words.

Not sooner such an incident is happened he told me that he is interesting in me. I'm so happy but this word is i want to listen by face to face. However, I was happy and immediately i answered it. Simple right?

Now we are very very love to each other but he sometimes very very silly
sometimes care me very very much ...
but now today i got angry with him i know that on 1 July he disappointed for somethings. He didn't tell me what happen to him. We need to compromise. But i want to hug him and say that " I LOVE YOU SO MUCH".